The Argument (ARC)

by Victoria Jenkins

  ‘Yeah, I’ve met her,’ she says, giving her mother a forced smile. ‘Nice little family reunion.’

  ‘You have no idea what you’ve done, do you? You stupid, stupid, little girl.’

  Her mother can insult her all she wants; Olivia doesn’t care. Her mother is a liar and she’s been caught out. No matter what Olivia is guilty of, her mother’s sins far outweigh hers, and she must know it. Perhaps her anger is felt as much towards herself as it is towards Olivia. Try as hard as she has, Olivia cannot see how someone in her mother’s position could fail to realise just how guilty she is.

  ‘Are we that much of an embarrassment to you that you couldn’t tell her we exist?’

  Her mother’s anger seems to fall from her, her face softens, and she sits at the foot of the bed, her body dropping on to the mattress with a defeated slump. She puts her elbows on her knees and her head in her hands and is silent for a moment, leaving Olivia wondering what’s going on. Olivia recoils, pulling her feet to one side, not wanting them to make physical contact. Her mother is playing a game, she is sure of it, and Olivia doesn’t want to take part in it.

  ‘It’s not about you,’ Hannah says finally, raising her head and putting her hands in her lap. ‘It’s about her. Didn’t you read this, then?’

  Olivia has read the diary, countless times. She knows what is written about Eleanor, though none of it makes much sense. The woman she met was weak and vulnerable, with no traces of the domineering tyrant described in the entries penned by her own mother.

  ‘My mother has got a lot of problems,’ her mother begins to explain. ‘She’s very sick – she has been for a long time. Mentally, I mean. She’s unstable…she has been for as long as I can remember. That’s why she lives where she does now - it isn’t safe for her to live alone anymore.’

  ‘But you used to look after her?’

  ‘When I was younger, yes, but look, it’s a lot more complicated than just what’s in here. How did you find out she was still alive, anyway?’

  ‘I heard you on the phone weeks ago. You said something about a visit, so I worked out she was either in hospital or in some sort of home.’

  Her mother smiles, but Olivia is unable to read the look. Though it may appear to be genuine, she cannot bring herself to believe there is any kindness in it. ‘Too clever for your own good.’

  Her eyes scan the length of the bed, and Olivia reads the unspoken words that dangle silently from the sentence. Not clever enough, obviously.

  ‘You know whatever happened here on Saturday night?’ Olivia waits for her mother to acknowledge the question with a nod. ‘It wasn’t me.’

  Olivia holds her mother’s gaze, trying to force her to believe the statement. She sees a flicker of something like doubt behind Hannah’s eyes, though Olivia isn’t sure that it’s enough. Her mother has made her mind up, but she is making a mistake. Olivia knows it wasn’t her, so she therefore knows it must have been someone else. Someone else was in their home, someone who wants to unnerve her mother for some reason they don’t yet know. She is glad of it, relieved, but they still need to find out who that person is.

  Olivia glances at the diary in her mother’s hand. There is something in it that needs explaining, something that has preyed on her mind repeatedly in the weeks since she found the diary in her mother’s room. How she didn’t get caught she will never know, and now she feels so guilty for whatever reprimand Rosie will be forced to face.

  ‘There’s half a page missing,’ Olivia says. ‘Like something’s been ripped out. What was it?’

  As quickly as it had appeared, her mother’s temporary softness evaporates between them and her anger returns, racing to her face like a flame. She looks at Olivia as though she hates her, which Olivia suspects she does. She has always suspected it. No matter what her mother tries to claim, Olivia has always felt herself treated differently. Rosie doesn’t receive the contempt Olivia gets, and Olivia feels she never had the love her sister had. As a younger child, Olivia would sometimes try to climb up on to her mother’s lap, searching for nothing more than the warmth of an embrace. It was rarely given; she recalls times when her mother had pushed her to one side, stood from where she had been sitting to address some job or another that she had suddenly remembered she hadn’t done, and Olivia would be left cold and rejected, wondering what she had done to make her mother so angry with her. It was never like that with Rosie. Olivia would watch the two of them play, Hannah chasing Rosie through the garden, and though their mother had played with her as well, it had always felt somehow different, as though the task of doing so was a duty, an undertaking she felt obliged to carry out.

  Hannah holds the diary to her chest, protecting it as though fearful of what it might be capable of if given back to Olivia’s hands. It doesn’t matter, she thinks; she has read and read that half-page so much that she can visualise it now, remembering almost word-for-word what was written there.

  * * *

  Dear Diary,

  * * *

  I’m sorry I haven’t written in you

  Something terrible has

  it into words. I feel dirty.

  keep going back over that night

  happen, but I can’t make any sense

  time, I know that, but it feels

  able to stop it. I can’t tell anyone

  Michael knows – he has been

  would have done. I wish

  this would have happened. I

  was just the thought of what

  I know different. I did the

  supermarket when I was doing

  seen it on the receipt. I am so

  though I am carrying around

  could make it go away, but

  something beautiful come from

  let him. There aren’t many

  to have found him, and I never

  will learn to feel differently, I

  hadn’t already known, this would

  me away from this life, give

  to be saved.

  * * *

  The half-completed sentences have kept Olivia awake at night, pre-occupying her brain with how they might have read before the page was ripped in half and the second piece discarded. What had happened to her mother that had made her feel dirty? What was it she couldn’t tell anyone about? What was it that her mother had felt she was carrying around with her? There are so many things Olivia wants to know, and though she realises she has pried into her mother’s secrets, she feels somehow that there are things she deserves to be aware of, things that affect her life as much as they do her mother’s.

  She recites the last few lines of the torn page, watching her mother’s face as the realisation of just how many times Olivia has read the diary dawns upon her.

  ‘What happened next?’

  ‘This isn’t a story, Olivia. This is my life. I’m entitled to my privacy.’

  Olivia laughs, but there’s no humour in the sound she makes; it is filled with ridicule and driven by scorn. She knows it and yet she doesn’t care. Privacy is a topic her mother has no right to make comment on, and she can think what she wants of her. They have so little of their relationship now left to lose that it almost seems not to matter what happens from here on in. And yet it does. Despite everything, Olivia wants the truth.

  ‘Oh, the irony.’

  Her mother ignores the comment. ‘There’s a lot you don’t understand about life. You think you’re all grown up now, but you’re still a little girl. You’ve proved that this past week.’

  ‘Only because that’s how you keep me. You won’t let me do anything - you won’t let me be a normal fifteen-year-old. If I’m still childish it’s because that’s how you’ve made me.’

  ‘All I’ve ever done is try to protect you.’

  Here we go again, Olivia thinks. The guilt lecture. She has heard it all so many times before, from her father as well as her mother, that she would be able to recite that back to her too.

  ‘Protect me from what? From living? From
having fun?’

  ‘What’s your idea of fun, Olivia? Getting drunk at parties? Wearing clothes that show off everything to everyone?’

  Olivia rolls her eyes. ‘You’re being ridiculous. Is that all you think people my age get up to?’

  Her mother’s perception of being young has come from internet searches and Instagram posts, the false pictures painted by profiles such as Casey Cartwright’s. Olivia knows plenty of the world’s Casey Cartwrights – there are too many of them to count in her school year alone – but there are also very many other types of teenagers, the kind Olivia would love to have the chance to be like. This is so typically judgemental of her mother, Olivia thinks, and yet further evidence of how out of touch her mother is with the real world that exists beyond the doors of their perfect home. There are things she wants to do, places she wants to see, but she will never get to do any of it while her mother seems so intent on ruling – and ruining – her life.

  ‘You’re young,’ her mother says, as though Olivia isn’t already aware of the fact. ‘There’s a lot you’ve still got to learn. You think the world is this magical place where nothing bad ever happens, but you’re wrong. I do understand, Liv. I was just like you once, remember.’

  But Olivia knows this isn’t the case. Her mother might have been fifteen once, but she was never anything like her; she doesn’t need to have seen her or known her at that age to know it as fact. She was probably as old then as she is now, wanting nothing more than a nice kitchen and a husband to make dinner for, like some housewife from the type of 1950s advertisement they’ve studied in school. What sort of ambition is that, to be tied to the kitchen sink, a slave to domesticity? Olivia wants better for herself; something more than her mother has ever been able to imagine. She doesn’t see why she should be condemned for dreaming.

  ‘I’m not as stupid as you think I am. I know how dangerous the world is.’

  Her mother laughs. ‘You’ve no idea. The bad people in this world far outweigh the good.’

  Olivia wants to scream with frustration. She feels it building in her head, this pressure that bubbles and rises to the surface, swelling behind her temples. ‘Well, you’d know all about that, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  There is silence between them for a moment while Olivia allows the comment time to settle. Her mother knows exactly what she means, and yet there are other things that make her bad, things she has never had to explain or had to justify to anyone.

  ‘Well, what exactly did you do, mother? This terrible thing that happened, this thing that made you feel so guilty you couldn’t even bear to read it, so you had to rip the page out of your diary. You love lecturing me, don’t you, picking out all my mistakes, but what about you? What did you do that’s so bad and so shameful?’

  Her mother stares at her, her eyes emptied of all the anger that resided there just moments ago, and when she speaks, Olivia feels the room shift beneath her, as though the floor has been pulled back and she is falling with nothing to reach for to help break her landing.

  ‘You stupid girl,’ her mother says again. ‘I was raped. Are you happy now?’

  17

  Nineteen

  Hannah

  * * *

  There is an awful moment of silence in which neither of them knows what to say, and Hannah immediately regrets those three words that have fallen from her lips. She has kept this secret from her children – from everyone other than Michael – for years now, and she feels angry that she has been forced into speaking of it by her own daughter. Olivia can’t leave things alone. She is dangerous and she will bring them all nothing but trouble. She has proved that by going to the care home and introducing herself to Eleanor. She had no right to, no right at all. She has no idea that trouble that she is potentially opening.

  ‘When did it happen?’

  Olivia thinks she is all grown up now, that she understands the world and the people in it, but this couldn’t be further from the truth. Her continued questioning of Hannah about all this proves she is still a naïve little girl, still ignorant to the horrors that exist outside the four walls of this house. If she thinks that challenging her mother can make her talk to her about what happened when Hannah hasn’t spoken a word of it in so many years, she is very much mistaken. Hannah doesn’t even speak to Michael about it, not anymore. They agreed a long time ago – after years of going over and over what happened that night and how she felt in its aftermath - that the best way to move on was to deal with it then and to afterwards remove it from their history, though Hannah never realised at the time just how difficult that would prove. Not difficult. Impossible.

  ‘This has nothing to do with you, Olivia.’

  Her face contorts. ‘Why do you do this with everything? Any time I try to speak to you about anything, you try to change the subject or just blank it out. You can’t stop me from wanting answers.’

  ‘No, you’re right,’ Hannah tells her. ‘But it doesn’t mean I have to give them to you.’

  Exasperated, Olivia moves to the wall and sits with her knees pulled up to her chest. Hannah thinks about leaving, but she knows it will not end here; Olivia will persist until she gets the answers she wants, or answers of some sort at least. The truth is, that although she pretends to Michael and to herself that she has moved what happened that night to the back of her brain, it is very much still at the forefront, still there when she closes her eyes at night. She sees that darkness and hears those noises in her dreams; if anything, being asleep is worse than being awake. During the day she can busy herself to keep the thoughts she doesn’t want to be haunted by in the shadows, but at night there is nothing to keep her mind distracted. What happened that night towers at the side of her bed, watching over her. It follows her into sleep and burns through any other dream that might try to take its place.

  ‘What happened?’

  Olivia’s voice has changed; she sounds less aggressive than she did just moments ago. Hannah is still sitting at the edge of the bed, with Olivia now behind her, leaning against the bedroom wall. She’s glad Olivia can’t see her face, or the shame she knows covers her like a veil each time she thinks about what happened that night.

  ‘I know you hate me.’

  Behind her, she hears Olivia shift on the duvet. ‘I don’t hate you. You’re my mum.’

  Her daughter’s words produce a charge of something unnameable that catches at her heart like an electric shock. Hannah recognises it for what it is, though she could never say it aloud. Guilt. Is this all it takes to merit the earning of a child’s love, she wonders, simply the title of being mum? Is that how little it takes for someone to love you unconditionally, regardless of what you do in return? She wonders then if she should have loved her own mother more. She was there, wasn’t she – controlling, manipulative, deceitful, but there, at least.

  Hannah never met her father. He left when she was a baby, and as she grew older and saw her mother for what she really was, she realised exactly why he had gone. She just wished he had taken her with her, or stayed around to see her occasionally, at least, though she forgave him this, justifying his absence and his abandoning of her with the reasoning that it is so much harder for a man to raise a child alone, and back in the eighties at least, so far less understood. In her mind, she has created an image of him as some sort of martyr, though on days when she is honest with herself, she realises that the depiction is a flawed one and that in truth her mother was right when she told Hannah, repeatedly, that her father was a weak and cowardly man who ran away from his responsibilities.

  ‘I’ve only ever tried to do what was best for you,’ she tells Olivia. ‘You think I’m controlling, but I just don’t want you to make the same mistakes I did.’

  Olivia has no idea what controlling is or how it behaves. Her own mother was an expert in manipulation, feigning for years the severity of an illness Hannah now questions ever existed at all. Eleanor’s M.E. – or her claims to it, at least �
� dominated their lives. From an early age, Hannah was responsible for the cooking, the cleaning and the washing, her mother simply not up to the physical demands that looking after a home and raising a child required. Eleanor would go to Hannah’s school occasionally and when it was expected – annual parents’ evenings and end-of-summer sports days – but eventually those visits faded out, and Hannah would be the only child in the school show with no one in the audience to watch her, the one who walked home alone in the dark, the original latchkey kid.

  By secondary school, her mother’s condition and mental health had deteriorated at a speed for which Hannah was unprepared. She became angrier and more demanding, going as far as to blame Hannah for the state she was now in, claiming that childbirth had ruined her and that her life would have been so much better had Hannah never been born. By now, Eleanor never left the house, her entire existence confined within the four walls of the box that was their home, and Hannah’s only trips into the outside world involved either school or the weekly food shop. She started to believe that her mother might have been right, and that it would have been better for them both had she never been born.

  ‘When you went to that party last Friday…’ Hannah starts, but her sentence lingers into silence as the past returns to stand beside her, looming over her and casting her into its shadow. Her thoughts that night the previous weekend had been filled with the darkest images, things she didn’t want to imagine but her mind wouldn’t let her un-see. She wouldn’t want anyone to go through what she did, and the thought of something like that happening to her own daughter had filled her with horror.